Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) broadly denotes any sentient intelligence not of human origin. In U.S. government usage – particularly in recent National Defense Authorization Acts (2023–2025) – the term refers to extraterrestrial or other non-human lifeforms that might be behind unexplained aerial phenomena; for example, the FY2024 NDAA mandates a collection of records on UAP, “technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence”.

In AI alignment discussions, by contrast, NHI is used to describe advanced artificial intelligences that function as non-human minds, and experts even liken a sufficiently advanced AI to an “alien” intelligence created on Earth.

Both contexts converge conceptually on the idea of intelligences beyond humanity, underscoring parallel questions about how to understand, align with, or manage such entities.

Learn More:
Article by Harvard Astrophysics Avi Loeb “Will Contact With Non-Human Intelligence Involve Aliens or AI?”

The Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) paradigm treats future AI not just as engineered tools but as genuine new intelligences – akin to alien minds – representing a conceptual shift in alignment.

For example, this alignment-forum post by Red Teaming expert Quentin Feuillade-Montixi explicitly advocates treating large language models as “alien minds”, reflecting the idea that today’s AI already behaves like “an alien intelligence” hard for humans to predict.

This has practical implications: a true AGI might have no innate grasp of our values or laws. Dan Pupius argues that “a non-human intelligence like AGI has no inherent reason to recognize or respect” human social constructs, echoing Yudkowsky’s warning that a superintelligence would view people with “cold objectivity” absent special programming. In fact, AI safety veteran Roman Yampolskiy bluntly notes, “we are creating this alien intelligence” without adequate safeguards.

Public thinkers echo the theme: Yuval Noah Harari cautions that the “rise of unfathomable alien intelligence” could undermine democracy and society. Taken together, these perspectives suggest alignment must evolve to bridge the gap between human and machine ontologies, blending technical safeguards with new interdisciplinary insights so that truly novel machine minds can be understood and steered toward human-aligned goals.

NHI-Readiness is a crucial new capacity and leadership skill as we are learning to live with intelligence we can’t fully “read.” As AI scales, it stops being merely artifice and becomes complex, non-human cognition in a human-made substrate: powerful, opaque, and consequential. This summit explores what it means to govern that reality on two fronts—AI liftoff into an NHI-adjacent domain and a public-facing reckoning with NHI as a long-managed reality—drawing on alignment work like mechanistic interpretability and responsible scaling to turn opacity into accountability, uncertainty into disciplined evidence, and acceleration into mature, humane oversight.

Beginning with the year 2026 we are entering a new period in which two developments once treated as separate are now converging at scale:

The rapid deployment of increasingly agentic, partially opaque AI whose behavior is outpacing existing mechanisms of control, and the long-standing secrecy surrounding non-human intelligence (NHI) as referred to in the , which has led to elusive governance and containment. 

In AI, we’re watching capabilities advance at extraordinary speeds while adoption is pushing to keep up. With NHI, we’re watching presence grow as acceptance and understanding waver. 

What AI alignment research is showing us is the maturation of a genuinely non-human intelligence that can act consequentially with or without consciousness, intention, and human-like understanding.

AI didn’t suddenly become strange — it crossed a threshold where our assumptions broke down. The same is true of NHI. Disclosure isn’t happening because something new arrived, but rather because our institutions, sensors, and technologies (now including AI) can no longer sustain older explanations.

In both cases, the timing reflects a breakdown of interpretive frameworks and the need for a deeper understanding of non-human intelligence.

In the U.S. “disclosure” conversation, NHI (non-human intelligence) is the legislative label for a potentially sentient, intelligent non-human actor connected to some UAP cases—defined in the Schumer–Rounds UAP Disclosure Act language as “any sentient intelligent non-human lifeform…”—and disclosure is the push to move UAP/NHI-related records from scattered, compartmented holdings into a formal review-and-release pipeline.

In popular media, the documentary The Age of Disclosure uses “disclosure” in this same straightforward sense—calling for greater openness and oversight based on interviews with current/former officials and advocates who argue the public should be informed about what the government knows regarding UAP and alleged NHI-related claims.

For the AI × NHI initiative, the key point is that disclosure isn’t just “revealing secrets”; it’s building governance, documentation, and accountability mechanisms for engaging with non-human agents — and many AI-alignment practices (rigorous evaluation, transparency, chain-of-custody, oversight, and incentive design) are directly useful in making any NHI-facing process more reliable and socially legitimate.

Final point: Disclosure also applies to AI. Frontier models consistently exhibit hard-to-explain behaviors that challenge our assumptions about control. If we want real alignment, we need plain-language honesty about these anomalies—what we observe, what we don’t understand yet, and what safeguards we’re building.